"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Sunday, May 04, 2014

The Myth of the Non-Profit Charter School

The AFT, NEA, and all their non-profit corporate hangers-on attempt to minimize their support for the total compliance segregated charter chain gangs by trying to distinguish between the "bad" for-profit charters and the "good" and the more numerous non-profit variety. There are 2 principle reasons this distinction is as phony as the idea that Dennis and Randi support the interests of teachers:1) Many "non-profit" charters pay for-profit management companies to run them:

How does it work? A non-profit group decides to
form a charter school, submits its charter to the state, and gets approved. In
Michigan, all charter school Boards of Directors are required to be registered
as non-profits. Once the school receives its charter authorization from the
state, the school then hires out educational services to for-profit or
non-profit EMOs. EMOs can provide anything from occasional reading tutors, to
administrative staff, to the full-time teaching staff and organization of a
charter school.

2) The vast majority of the thousands of "non-profit charter schools pay their CEOs obscene amounts of "non-profit" cash in salary and benefits each year. In addition, the Wall Street hedge funds and plutocratic billionaires who give hundreds of millions each year to supplement the tax money handed to these chain gangs make out like the bandits that they are, thanks to tax laws:

Thanks to a little discussed law passed in 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, banks and equity funds that invest in charter schools and other projects in underserved areas can take advantage of a very generous tax credit — as much as 39 percent — to help offset their expenditure in such projects. In essence, that credit amounts to doubling the amount of money they have invested within just seven years. Moreover, they are allowed to combine that tax credit with job creation credits and other types of credit, as well collect interest payments on the money they are lending out — all of which can add up to far more than double in returns. This is, no doubt, why many big banks and equity funds are so invested in the expansion of charter schools. There is big money being made here — because investment is nearly a sure thing.

So the next time you see one of Randi's girls talking about high quality non-profit charters, please ask her who's paying her salary.

1 comment:

Someone who is better at research and has more time than me needs to total up the pass through to CMO's and come up with a dollar amount. That way we could see the true amount of money wasted on duplicate compensation for management of schools. Remember the days before charters when the superintendent of a big city made about 1/4 million or less, and now there are multiple charter outfits in every major city contributing to CEO salaries that are at least twice as high in many cases. This is the waste fraud and abuse we need to focus on, money that should stay in the class room instead of going to those duplicate salaries or in the case of for profit charters, to a few major shareholders on top of the bloated salaries of the CEO's and their underlings.